As the day of the memorial service turned to evening, Miller and Stogsdill found themselves on the way north, to Ferndale, Washington. They were aware that LeRoy Flammang wasn’t the only crewmember who’d left the Investor under a cloud. Roy Tussing, they heard, left the Investor after a heated argument with Mark Coulthurst. They wanted to talk to him. They wanted to know what he knew.
Tussing was a tall, slender man with reddish hair and a matching beard. He’d fished with Mark Coulthurst for years.
When the troopers asked Tussing why he left the Investor, he seemed to dance around his reasons. Like he knew something, but didn’t want to say it. “The main thing was, I felt it was a real grind working there,” he said. “It was really· hard. The price of fish was very low. We were working extremely hard, long hours, no sleep. We weren’t making a whole lot of money. That was… was a part of it. I was having problems at home with Kim, my girlfriend.”
“Umm,” Miller replied, wondering how far this would take them.
“And I wasn’t very happy being there. I didn’t really care for the boat. And, you know, to me it was like the boat was going to Mark’s head. He was very proud of it. He would tell people, you know, about the boat and he’d kind of BS about it a little bit, you know and say that it was a new boat–which it had been fished prior to that–and I didn’t really consider it a new boat. And I felt that he was kind of leading people on about his abilities and so on and so forth, you know. And that rubbed me really wrong, to have somebody do that because I was around a lot of the time when he’d be bragging about this.”
The differences between these two men seemed considerable. From everything Miller knew, Mark Coulthurst had been a successful guy. Hard driving. Ambitious. Roy Tussing was more than a little uncomfortable about the direction his skipper was taking. That in itself could have spelled disaster. But Miller needed more.
Excerpts from the unpublished original manuscript, “Sailor Take Warning,” by Leland E. Hale. That manuscript, started in 1992 and based on court records from the Alaska State Archive, served as the basis for “What Happened in Craig.”
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.
Order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE. True crime from Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.